Can architecture save the world? Vishaan Chakrabarti believes that designers had better give it a shot. In his recent book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy, the New York-based architect and planner asserts a bold vision for architecture’s role in tackling twin crises of our era: climate change and societal division. The world continues to urbanize, and city living helps to reduce our impact on the Earth.
That leaves a lot of work for architects to do. Chakrabarti, who founded the New York-based Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), argues that the design professions need to deliver mass quantities of new buildings, mostly housing. In the process, they must think about social and environmental justice and also making beautiful buildings and cities – delivering “jobs, justice and joy.” To demonstrate, Chakrabarti uses projects from PAU along with work by contemporaries such as Diébédo Francis Kéré and landmarks from London, Tokyo, Ahmedabad and Dhaka. In the latter, for instance, the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque uses brick latticework walls to evoke traditional jali screens and also provide ventilation, helping the building serve another role as a social gathering place and a refuge from the heat. Meanwhile, he cites PAU’s own work in Niagara Falls, N.Y., which aims to bring tourists into that city’s downtown through a mix of open space, heritage sites and lookout points.
Unlike many architects, he doesn’t offer a singular design formula, but invites collaboration among designers to deliver “positive social friction,” and simple, unfancy buildings – all in a city whose public spaces bring people together, outside of their cars, with fellow residents of the metropolis.
The book’s title begins with “architecture,” but most of it is about issues that go far beyond building design. Why?
I wanted to get to architecture’s role in the social, political and racial division we have in our societies. I believe that we either build connective environments or rebuild segregating environments, and we’ve spent the last half-century building both carbon-intensive and highly segregated environments. The suburbs are the easiest thing to talk about in that regard.
Yet you argue that new urban buildings are also “mundane and monolithic.”
Yes. I’m trying to make an argument for the power of architecture to connect us. I don’t think we’re doing that with our new architecture. For the most part, we’re building the same blue glass skyscraper with the same chain store on the bottom. And I think that is pulling people apart at some level. I’m not going to argue that somehow that’s the source of our political misery in the United States or elsewhere, but it certainly doesn’t help.
Instead, you say, architecture needs to create “positive social friction.”
It’s the idea that you interact with someone who’s different than you, thinks differently than you, prays differently than you, votes differently than you, and you understand that that person is not that scary. That person is a human being, you both need protection from the rain, and you can actually have a conversation in [a] physical space. It’s the opposite of what social media is designed to do to us.
How do buildings contribute to that urbanity? Your examples are very unorthodox: from the Altes Museum in Berlin to modernist apartment buildings.
There’s something about all of these places that is inviting and connective. Some are very urban, like the escalator system in Hong Kong. I talk about [architect] Gurmeet Sian and his Phoenix Garden in London, which is the size of a Volkswagen bus. But it declares that a community garden can have some sense of civic grandeur. And Marina Tabassum’s Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka is a community centre, it’s a flood refuge zone – it’s a whole bunch of things in addition to just being incredibly beautiful. There is this idea of building collective community.
Where do you see signs of urbanity growing in North America?
I see a lot of really good public work in small towns and mid-sized cities across the United States, which are urbanizing at a rapid clip. Charlotte [N.C.] has a very significant new light-rail system. Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. And we [at PAU] just finished a plan for downtown Niagara Falls, New York. What’s become really clear to me, since I wrote the first book, is that densification is not going to be primarily driven by the world’s 10 biggest cities. The success or failure of it is going to hinge on what happens in smaller communities.
You offer an architectural solution: the three-storey apartment building you dub “Goldilocks.”
It’s not a universal answer. But that is the kind of housing we’re going to need to build in our smaller communities that still gives you enough density for a bus rapid transit line. Also, in the book, there’s a diagram that shows these buildings forming courtyards. The architecture is a building block for public space. And that gets you to positive social friction.
It can build the sense of urbanity that the book talks about, and it’s possible in almost every community in the world. It’s a prototype that could be made of brick in some places, in wood in other places, or light-gauge steel. It’s a different model for how we can build housing that people can afford, and also build a sense of urbanity and community that I think we’re desperately yearning for.
Why is the design of buildings important to this model?
Well: How do you create a cultural demand for urbanity? That, I think, is an enormous challenge. I don’t have easy answers for it. But in the book, I talk about our very low-budget affordable-housing project in [Brooklyn]. There we’re doing enough with the masonry to create a sense of a streetscape. You can do it. It costs a tiny bit more. But so much of it is about intentionality.
You don’t believe that good architecture requires huge expense.
When I give lectures, I show examples from the Global South: This is in Dhaka, and it’s really nice. Here’s a refugee camp where they’re figuring out how to live together with all these different ethnicities. There is this puritanical idea that quality and doing things right always costs more. And it’s just not true! It’s just fundamentally not true. This crisis is not about a lack of money. It’s about a lack of imagination.
